01. Ou se trouve la mort?02. The End Of A Sub-Elitist Addiction03. Art Or Cancer?04. The Other Rat05. Mother And Whore06. Static Involution07. L'indecision d'etre08. Keeping The Structure

As someone who has had to bushwhack through Jean Baudrillard and Herbert Marcuse for various undergraduate classes, it takes a special kind of babbling, incoherent pretentiousness to make me really rub my eyes and scratch my head in bewilderment—the kind of babbling, incoherent pretentiousness that's included in the press-pack for Decline Of The I's new disc.

And I quote:

"Inhibition is the first part of a trilogy that attach great importance to music, but also to the lyrics and message hidden within: World is aggression. Aggression towards the subject. How can one react? How can one stand one's own freedom facing this machine, which crushes the individual, its body and its mental? To suffer. To rebel. To avoid."

All the talk of machines, aggression towards subject-worlds, and freedom that's not, by definition, freedom, warrants at least a "The Fuck?" (or two), for sure. But you'd do well to get those out of the way from the start; this album is actually pretty fucking deece.

It might not deliver on "attach[ing] great importance to music" in any noticeably new way (or, really, in any way for that matter), but at its best it's a fairly mesmerizing listen and at it's worst, it's just regular old catchy black metal. Either way, it sounds good.

The goal here might not have been accomplished entirely—the band allegedly "describes itself as a mix between Burzum, Neurosis and Code," and they don't really sound like a mix of those bands--but they still sound unique enough. The brand of melancholy, atmospheric-ish black metal here, led by "A.K." of Vorkreist and Merrimack (among other groups), has hints of post and industrial, injecting the mid-paced black formula that makes up the stylistic roots of this album with enough quirk to make it unpredictable and engaging enough.

In other words, it's worth checking out if you enjoy dark, catchy things that make you want to crawl around in the nude standing up for one's own freedom facing this body and mental individual-crushing machine...